Winners and Losers: Our 2018 predictions

12.01.2018

4MIN

VR

AR

Winners and Losers: Our 2018 predictions

WINNERS

We see AR as the big winner of the industry for the next 12 months and beyond. And we’re predicting that AR will be for technology what Facebook is for connectivity; both addictive and a part of our daily lives.

Apple AR. Anything Apple does with it’s iphone, reaches roughly 212 million consumersdirectly. We predict this AR kit will offer some kick-ass applications too. Apple has put lots of effort at its AR SDK and guess what? It’s awesome! They manage to do what no one has so far: offer a stable AR experience within your iPad and iPhone on iOS 11.

Vuforia. We believe Vuforia could actually change the way consumer/goods companies are integrating AR technologies in their own marketing strategies. Why? Well, it’s pretty easy to see that the big winners are consumer products companies. Vuforia can allow consumers to inspect any product, from any angle, from their home. In an economy where people increasingly do shopping from home, isn’t that the future? Their acquisition by PTC is the driving force behind this, and PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann said of the merger, “when coupled with PTC’s IoT and analytics platforms, Vuforia will unlock a world of possibilities for creating new ways to design products, to monitor and control products, and to instruct operators and technicians in the appropriate methods of use and service.“

Unity. It’s hard not to mention unity. With more than a million developers using the software, it’s not difficult to see why we predict Unity will continue to drive the entire VR and AR industry as they have proved doing so far.

LOSERS

From VR experiences to underwhelming tech, our predictions of 2018 losers are the companies struggling to keep up, or hold their own.

The Void. Not disputing the fact their experiences are breathtaking. But, we doubt the business model is sustainable. It seems The Void has not figured out yet where and how to expand. For now, they’re doing everything from content to distribution. They have closed their Dubai location, entered a cinema complex in Toronto, their Lindon location seems be also temporarily closed, and they are building new locations close to Disney parks (yes you got it… not in the parks). Scaling high-end non-modular experiences ain’t easy. There are many questions they still have to answer, especially who they actually are. Hopefully they’ll figure out soon.

ARCore from Google. We’re getting into the AR era… and unsurprisingly Google have also jumped on board. They’ve just released its SDK for Android called ARCore. It seems that they have pretty solid set of features such as motion tracking, environmental understanding and light estimation. But, in terms of software there are some barriers, it’s currently only compatible with Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 -and while a developer at Android found a way around this, apps still crashed everytime with Moto G3 and Nexus 5X. For the moment, it isn’t competing with Apple’s AR Kit, but let’s wait for the kick-ass app.